BEHIND THE LINES—
There is no escaping scrutiny in a connected world. The city officials of Ferguson,
Mo., discovered this the hard way. My first email on Thursday was from an Al
Jazeera America flack who said the network’s news crew there was tear-gassed.

“Last night at 10:30 p.m. CD in Ferguson, Mo., an Al Jazeera America news crew
was reporting behind police barricades. They were easily identifiable as a
working television crew. As they were setting up their camera for a live
report, tear gas canisters landed in their proximity and police fired rubber
bullets in their direction. Police continued to shoot after crew members
clearly and repeatedly shouted ‘Press.’

The situation, as reflected in the press for the ensuing hours, was one of
dystopian chaos; of generations of bad blood exploding across the media from a
suburb no one heard of until Sunday. Where the shining light was not welcome. Where
Wesley Lowery of The Washington Post
and Ryan Reilly of Huffington Post
were detained for allegedly trespassing in a McDonalds, where they were both
posting over the franchise’s Wi-Fi. Lowery wrote a first-hand
account of his arrest, which in turn fanned flames on Twitter, where
Anonymous tweeted what it said was the name of the police officer who shot
Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black kid with his hands in the air, according to
witnesses.

The press picked up on it and reported the reveal, but not the guy’s name.
Anonymous, meanwhile, hashtaged him, opening an electronic conduit of hatred in
his direction. The St. Louis and Ferguson police said they’d outted a
dispatcher. Twitter suspended Anonymous, or rather, @TheAnonMessage—one of many
Anonymi—which then moved over to @TheAnonMessage2. The Internet officially
doesn’t care if the outted guy was a dispatcher or the police officer who shot
and killed Brown. He continued getting hate messages after reports emerged that
he was misidentified.

KDSK-TV has video
of the Al Jazeera crew being tear-gassed. KDSK, the Gannett-owned NBC in St.
Louis, had two photojournalists and reporter Elizabeth Matthews at the scene.
One of the camera operators, a 23-year veteran news shooter, was recording a
confrontation between a citizen and a police officer before taking a “bean bag
round” to the camcorder, according to KDSK. They were subsequently run off.

Al Jazeera followed up with comments from the news team in Ferguson.

“We were very surprised by this. We had been there for about an hour,”
said Ash-har Quraishi, chief correspondent for Al Jazeera America’s Chicago
Bureau. “We had been in contact with police officers who were just feet away
from us. I had spoken to police officers who knew we were there. We had had
discussions with them. We understood this was as far as we could get in terms
of where the protest was going on, about a mile up the road. So, we didn’t
think there would be any problems here so we were very surprised.

“We were very close to where those [tear gas] canisters were shot from. We
yelled, as you heard there [on the video]. We were yelling that we were press.
But they continued to fire. We retreated about half a block into the
neighborhood, until we could get out of that situation.“Police have said that protestors tossed Molotov cocktails in their
direction. We didn’t see that because we weren’t close enough in. Again, as you
mentioned, we didn’t have gas masks because we were about a mile away…. We
thought we were at a safe distance but clearly, they pushed through and
actually fired [tear gas] canisters into the neighborhood.”From Marla Cichowski, Al Jazeera
field producer:

“We were clearly set up as press with a full live shot set-up. As soon
as first bullet hit the car we screamed out loud, ‘We are press,’ ‘This is
media.’Police that were
there at the intersection directing traffic earlier knew we were there. We
never drove around the police barricade…. There was another station local NBC
parked across the street from us the whole time. They shined a huge floodlight
at us before firing and I can only imagine they could see what they were
shooting at.”
And from Kate O’Brien, president of Al Jazeera America:
“Al Jazeera America is stunned by this egregious assault on freedom of the
press that was clearly intended to have a chilling effect on our ability to
cover this important story. Thankfully all three crew members are physically
fine.

“We believe that this situation must be investigated along with those involving
our colleagues at other media outlets.”

Elsewhere in the media fabric, @TheAnonMessage2 continued to tweet. “Operation #Ferguson was created long before
EMS allegedly came to the scene of #MikeBrown's death. If that doesn't
shock you... In fact, we know that EMS never ended up coming.”
There is no escaping scrutiny in a connected world.

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When I was a kid, I was told that this only happens in Communist countries like China & Russia. I, for one, hope that the media keeps on top of this story, and rips them apart. Who gave the order to arrest the reporters? Who gave the orders to shoot Al Jazeera? And how far up the chain of command does it go?
---Duke & Banner

When real "news" crews cover hurricanes they expect to get rained on. Covering a riot and getting some tear gas in your eyes is part of the J-O-B. It is not newsworthy. Rather then whining about the propagandists from Qatar's state sponsored Al Jazeera getting all teary-eyed at Ferguson, you should have written about the real atrocities facing the free press, the beheadings of real journalists by the other Qatar-funded fanatics, the Jihadists.
Jerry Kenney
America's Survival TV